“The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.”
Time (26 June 2006)
Sect. 39; vol. 2, p. 128; H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler (trans.) The Works of Lucian of Samosata.
How to Write History
“The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.”
Time (26 June 2006)
“History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.”
Source: A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
This statement is not to be found in the works of Herodotus. It appears in the acknowledgements to Mark Twain's A Horse's Tale (1907) preceded by the words "Herodotus says", but Twain was simply summarizing what he took to be Herodotus' attitude to historiography.
Misattributed
Acknowledgements
Twain does not quote Herodotus here, he only sums up what he believes to have been Herodotus' approach to the writing of history. Nevertheless, this apocryphal statement is now often quoted as being the very words of Herodotus.
A Horse's Tale (1907)
“For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life.”
Introduction
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
2011, Tucson Memorial Address (January 2011)
Context: Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, "when I looked for light, then came darkness." Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.